Sunday, 17 March 2013

Quantum Action: 10,000 Times Faster Than Light?

Spooky! Quantum Action Is 10,000 Times Faster Than Light

Here, a false-color image of a laser beam showing a superposition of entangled photons spinning in opposite directions. CREDIT: Copyright: Robert Fickler/University of Vienna

How fast do quantum interactions happen? Faster than light, 10,000 times faster.

That's what a team of physicists led by Juan Yin at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai found in an experiment involving entangled photons, or photons that remain intimately connected, even when separated by vast distances.They wanted to see what would happen if you tried assigning a speed to what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance."

They didn't find anything unexpected, but that wasn't the point: in physics, sometimes it's good to be sure. The group published their work on the ArXiv.org, a preprint server for physics papers.